Paul McHugh
About
Paul McHugh is a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Medicine and a reliable source of authoritative-sounding but highly misleading and flawed work in the area of gender.
McHugh opposes sex reassignment surgery for transgender people[1] and against medical transition in general, especially for young people. He shut down the gender identity clinic at JHU in 1979, for reasons that do not stand up well under scrutiny. He was apparently also responsible for the fact that JHU stopped offering SRS in 2004 – a fact which is widely cited by anti-trans activists as proof that SRS is ineffective, despite the fact that JHU reversed this decision in 2016.
He is also known for sharply dysconservative views on the subject of sexuality, most notably stating that homosexuality is an "erroneous desire"[2]. Multiple JHU colleages have sharply disagreed with his conclusions[3], and none have come to his defense.
Despite this, the increasingly-far-right Wall Street Journal gave him column space in 2016 in which to post his uninformed views on transgender surgery and gender identity.
He has also held the following positions:
- advisory board, False Memory Syndrome Foundation (see SourceWatch)
- member, President's Council on Bioethics during the Bush-Cheney administration
Views
- In an editorial for the Discovery Institute, he uses the teach the controversy fallacy against the theory of evolution by natural selection and then raises a number of long-refuted objections[4]
Pages
- /gender
- author:Paul McHugh: automatic index of all filed writings (currently only those found in /gender)
Links
Reference
- Wikipedia
Conservapedia: only one passing reference as of 2017-08-07
SourceWatch: two references (no equivalent page) as of 2017-08-07RationalWiki: some information but no equivalent page as of 2017-08-07- GLAAD (page needs some proofreading, e.g. mis-spells United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and gives no source for the claim that McHugh was a member of the USCCB's National Review Board; a search of USCCB's web site finds that a History of the National Review Board does name him as a founding member, and also reveals that they frequently cite his work as authoritative)
Footnotes
- ↑ 2016-05-13 Transgender Surgery Isn't the Solution
- ↑ 2010-01-26 Interview with Dr. Paul McHugh: "There Is No Gay Gene" "You see, what has happened with the permissive movement is that it has picked up the Freudian confusion of desire and love, making them the same. And with the implication, for example, that I must desire my mother. I don't desire my mother. I love my mother. Now the fact is that in my marriage, of course, I desired this woman and I felt love for her. Now, 50 years into marriage with her, I still desire her, but now I love her. She's irreplaceable. There is this thing that has come and it's different. This person exists for me as irreplaceable. So, there is this confusion of desire and love. [Homosexuality] is erroneous desire."
- ↑ 2016-09-29 In 'Sun' op-ed, Johns Hopkins faculty members disavow report on gender, sexuality, which references
- ↑ 2005-03-28 Teaching Darwin: Why we're still fighting about biology textbook. "...Darwinism being quite obviously a biological theory and open to dispute. To claim otherwise is to be woefully misinformed."